20 Movies That Caused Riots, Bans And Outrage Around The World

D.W. Griffith’s epic 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, about the American Civil War, created the modern blockbuster but also glorified the Ku Klux Klan and demeaned African Americans. The recently established NAACP, a civil rights organization, organized national boycotts. Protests against the film outside movie theaters in Boston and Philadelphia turned violent, and cities including Chicago, Denver, and Minneapolis banned it outright. A line later attributed to President Woodrow Wilson, calling it “like writing history with lightning,” is often repeated, but there is no evidence he ever actually said it.

Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film, Battleship Potemkin, about a 1905 mutiny of Tsarist Russian sailors, employed radical editing techniques to broadcast an unapologetic pro-Marxist message. The British censors feared it might incite strikes and other industrial action, so Britain’s official censorship body, the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), effectively banned its commercial screening from 1926 to 1954 (although it was available to private film clubs). France and Germany also put restrictions on it.

An eye gets sliced open by a razor in the opening sequence of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s 16-minute Surrealist short, Un Chien Andalou (1929). Premiering in Paris in June of 1929, the film disgusted and angered many in the audience. Buñuel later wrote in his memoir My Last Sigh that he had carried stones in his coat pocket in case the viewers attacked him. There is no record that they did, but bringing your own ammunition to your movie premiere certainly says something about your expectations for the reviews.

On December 3, 1930, far-right French nationalists, including members of the League of Patriots, invaded the Studio 28 movie theater in Paris to disrupt Luis Buñuel’s anti-Catholic Surrealist film L’Âge d’Or. Protesters flung ink onto the screen, set off canisters of tear gas, attacked moviegoers, and smashed Surrealist paintings on display in the lobby. Paris police banned the film rather than arresting the rioters.

While Universal’s movie version of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war book All Quiet on the Western Front went on to win Best Picture in the US, the German premiere on December 5, 1930, was marred by organized violence. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels dispatched more than 100 Brownshirts, members of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary organization, to disrupt the screening. They threw stink bombs, let loose white mice, and shouted antisemitic epithets at the Mozartsaal theater. On December 11, 1930, the American film was banned in Germany.

A Warner Bros. picture from 1932, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, starring the great actor Paul Muni, told the true story of escaped convict Robert Elliott Burns and revealed the savagery of Southern prison chain gangs. It made Georgia officials angry; they said it defamed the state’s prison system. The state banned the film entirely, and the state’s wardens sued for millions of dollars in libel damages. Warners’ director, Mervyn LeRoy, and studio head Jack Warner were told that if they set foot in Georgia, they’d be put in jail. Talk about taking a bad review personally.

The 1932 gangster movie Scarface was produced by Howard Hughes and directed by Howard Hawks. Civic groups, police chiefs, and Italian-American associations called for a ban on Scarface. State censor boards required revisions, and the film was retitled Scarface: The Shame of the Nation with a different ending. After some states refused to release it, Hughes distributed the movie in regions without a censor board. If one audience couldn’t see it, he simply went looking for another.

MGM director Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) featured real circus sideshow performers with disabilities. Early test screenings in 1932 sent patrons fleeing the theater. Studio publicity claimed that a woman threatened to sue the studio for causing her to miscarry. This claim is unverified and likely grew out of legal threats rather than any actual medical incident. MGM cut 30 minutes from the film, footage that is now lost, and withdrew it. The British censor banned the film for 30 years, from 1932 to 1962.

When Paramount decided to adapt H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau as Island of Lost Souls (1932), they cast Charles Laughton as the scientist who was surgically transforming animals into people. The animals’ refrain of “What is the law? Are we not men?”, coupled with graphic images of vivisection, or surgery performed on living animals for experimentation, incensed various religious leaders and humane societies. In 1933, British censors declared the film was “against nature” and banned it for 25 years, until 1958. Even Wells publicly disavowed the film.

In Baby Face (1933), Barbara Stanwyck played Lily Powers, a bank clerk who sleeps her way up the corporate ladder with no ill consequences or moral qualms. The film was released in July 1933, and the presence of an unpunished female character on screen enraged civic and Catholic leaders, prompting them to form the Catholic Legion of Decency later that year. The Legion would demand that the studios give power to their censor, Joseph Breen, and comply with the Production Code, Hollywood’s self-censorship rulebook, beginning on July 1, 1934.

Czech director Gustav Machatý’s Ecstasy (1933) made 18-year-old Hedy Kiesler, later known as the actress Hedy Lamarr, an international name thanks to nude swimming scenes and a close-up of a woman having an orgasm. Pope Pius XI condemned the film in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. The United States Customs Service confiscated imported prints in 1934 on charges of obscenity, which held up the film’s release in the US for several years. This movie really managed to upset everyone from customs officials to the pope.

Director Frank Capra matched Barbara Stanwyck with Nils Asther (in yellowface) as a Chinese warlord for whom Stanwyck’s missionary character falls in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). Picketed by moral crusaders and segregationist groups upon its January 1933 release, the film marked one of the few box-office failures for Capra. According to Capra’s 1971 autobiography, the film was banned throughout the British Empire. British censorship documents suggest it passed with only a few small excisions.

The Great Dictator (1940) was Charlie Chaplin’s satire of Adolf Hitler, which he wrote, directed, and starred in. It was released in October 1940 while the US was still not at war. Before its release, the film’s anti-Hitler satire caused the German American Bund, a domestic pro-Nazi organization, to picket theaters and send death threats to Chaplin. Chaplin was also pressured by the Hays Office, which enforced Hollywood’s censorship rules, to abandon the film to avoid hurting trade with foreign countries. It was banned across Nazi-occupied Europe and Axis-aligned nations, but remains Chaplin’s highest-grossing film in the US.

The Howard Hughes-produced western The Outlaw (1943) was made specifically to exploit star Jane Russell’s assets, with the movie’s advertising emphasizing her ample cleavage. The Catholic Legion of Decency condemned it, and police vice squads raided theaters in cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Jersey City during its limited 1943 run and its wider 1946 re-release, grabbing film reels and arresting theater bosses. Hughes fought the bans in court for five years. According to Russell, she secretly wore her own padded bra instead of the specially engineered one Hughes designed for her. After all that engineering, she didn’t even wear the thing.

In 1945, producer Kroger Babb sold Mom and Dad, a sex-education exploitation film, filled with actual footage of childbirth and sexually transmitted infections, to gender-segregated audiences. Babb employed faux nurses to peddle sex-ed tracts at cinema foyers, inciting city council and church outcry. Babb defended himself against hundreds of city bans in courts in cases that became known as Babb v. City Censors. And Babb’s hype was a success; this became one of the highest-grossing independent films of its day.

The western Duel in the Sun (1946), produced by David O. Selznick, about illicit passion between Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck, who eventually end up shooting each other, was denounced by critics as “Lust in the Dust” and condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency. Church members picketed it around the country and it was banned or cut before its release in some cities. Selznick responded by setting up simultaneous showings to collect revenue before local authorities could act. He wasn’t exactly going to wait around for the censors to catch up.

In 1950, Italian director Roberto Rossellini’s 40-minute segment The Miracle, with Anna Magnani playing a peasant woman convinced that her pregnancy is a holy miracle, was screened in New York as part of an anthology film called Ways of Love. The Catholic War Veterans picketed the Paris Theatre, where it was showing; the theater also received bomb threats, and New York’s licensing board revoked its screening permit. Distributor Joseph Burstyn appealed to the Supreme Court, which unanimously decided in 1952 that films are protected speech.

Otto Preminger directed The Moon Is Blue (1953), a romantic comedy for United Artists that went forth without the seal of the Hollywood Production Code because he refused to remove the words virgin and mistress from the script. In retrospect the movie seems utterly tame, but at the time it was enough to provoke condemnation from the Catholic Legion of Decency and even some picketing and the arrest of a Jersey City theater manager. Preminger took the matter to court, where he was victorious and demonstrated that movies could be successful without the code seal. All that trouble over “virgin” and “mistress.”

Director Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1956) catapulted 22-year-old French actress Brigitte Bardot to worldwide stardom as a sex symbol. When it opened in America in October 1957, Catholic organizations picketed its screenings across the country; in Lake Placid, New York, priests gave theater owners money not to book the movie. Vice squad police invaded drive-ins and arrested projectionists for distributing obscene material. For better or worse, and partly because of it, the movie became the most successful foreign release in America up to that time.

Baby Doll (1956) was a Tennessee Williams script about a teenage bride waiting to have sex for the first time, with Carroll Baker in the title role and Elia Kazan directing. The movie was advertised on a giant Times Square billboard and, importantly, had already been cleared by Hollywood’s censors. But on December 16, 1956, Cardinal Francis Spellman climbed into the pulpit at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and called the film “evil in concept,” saying that any Catholic who saw it committed a mortal sin. The Legion of Decency organized a boycott. Hollywood had given the movie permission to play. The cardinal was telling millions of Catholics that watching it could put their souls at risk.

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